The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming a new book by Howard Friel, reveals that Bjørn Lomborg’s infamous climate-change-denying book Cool It (a favorite among climate deniers) grievously misreported much of the science it cited. Friel painstakingly investigated the pages and pages of references in Cool It, and found a “pattern of nonexistent footnoted support for assertions in the text.”
Lomborg also went to town on the 2002 breakup of Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf, which environmentalists blamed on global warming. “The Larsen area” has been breaking up for centuries, he argued, so the huge breakup cannot be blamed on man-made global warming. But the study he cited for that statement, writes Friel, “was not a study of the Larsen B ice shelf…Thus, while supposedly demonstrating that the 2002 [breakup] had a precedent during the Holocene, Lomborg dropped the specific reference to Larsen B, inserted the broader ‘Larsen area’ reference, and cited a study about the Larsen A area as if it supported his claims about the Larsen B area.”
I’ve quoted the above at some length because it is indicative of two things: Friel’s fine-grained sleuthing and the unfortunate lack of reader-friendliness that has resulted. Friel also undercuts his thesis by significant overkill, chastising Lomborg for describing a source as “Figure 10.6.1” rather than “Section 10.6.1.” That is sloppiness on Lomborg’s part, not duplicity, and including it–and many, many like it–makes Friel seem like Inspector Javert in obsessive pursuit of Jean Valjean. Mixing the trivial with the significant doesn’t help his argument. Friel also gets tripped up by the recent revelation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relied for its assertion about Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 on an off-the-cuff (since retracted) comment, not a rigorous study. Friel criticizes Lomborg for saying they would disappear by the end of this century, arguing that he should have accepted the IPCC’s date of 2035. Oops.
Book Review: The Lomborg Deception
(via /.)
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